Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 17, 2012 @10:14PM
from the from-this-day-forth-no-erlang dept.

New submitter SIGSTOP writes "The LINC [OpenFlow 1.2 software-based] switch has now been released as commercial friendly open source through the FlowForwarding.org community website, encouraging users and vendors to use LINC and contribute to its development. The initial LINC implementation focuses on correctness and feature compliance. Through an abstraction layer, specialized network hardware drivers can be easily interfaced to LINC. It has been implemented in Erlang, the concurrent soft-real time programming language invented by Ericsson to develop their next generation networks."

Anyway, an Ethernet switch or Router has two engines - The low level ('fowarding pane') of which is high speed 'copy packet from port a to port b'. It's not very bright, as that's almost all it CAN do, but it's very fast at that task. Of course, to be useful, an ethernet switch has to have more smarts -- for example, learning which switch port has which MAC on it and things like that. In a normal switch, it can, when confronted with a packet ask a higher level processor "oy! What should I do with this packet?" (expecting that second processor to answer "copy it to port c" or "drop packet" or something very simple like that.)

OpenFlow decouples these two - normally they're part of the same physical box, and normally completely propritory. With this approach, the second 'what should I do' can now be implemented on different hardware - even a general purpose PC. You can write your own programs to manage how packets are forwarded.

Exactly what this gives other than a research test-bed, I have no idea.